Roughly a month ago I wrote my review for Destiny. I was trying to defend it. At the time I loved the game and everything about it. I saw all of the reviews saying that it was lacking in many departments and I shook them off. I heard the cry of how bland the story was and convinced myself that the others just didn't understand. I was wrong.
I don't hate Destiny. I don't even dislike Destiny. It is a good game and I have gotten the dollar value I put into it and then some. But it isn't great. It has flaws, but so do a lot of games. So why does Destiny have such a big outcry from its fans because of them? Well there's a few reasons.
The first reason is who made the game. Bungie. The golden child of the Xbox and the people who I blame for a good deal of my longest lasting friendships. Bungie is a well known name in the gaming industry, and they pretty much redefined online gaming with Halo 2 and continued to knock console online multiplayer out of the park with the rest of the Halo games. They have a reputation and its a good one. But with good reputations people tend to expect really good things.
The second reason was the media hype. This isn't anything new, but anyone could do a quick google search for "destiny game" before September and find loads of articles on it. The articles talked about the content Bungie planned on putting in the game. A lot of people saw these planned features in the game as promises, however not all, and frankly most of, the things Bungie planned wound up being put into Destiny. So to anyone who had been following Destiny for a while, the expectation versus the reality was far different. As it tends to be, the reality was worse.
The third reason was the public beta. A beta build for a game being released to the public really accomplishes a few things. It lets game creators test out the server infrastructure to see if it can handle many gamers playing their game online at the same time. It has gamers test for bugs in the code. It also is a big marketing move.
While betas are not just playable demos of a game before they are launched, it has served that function for quite some time. In Destiny's case, the beta showed only a very early part of the game and honestly the earliest first part of Destiny are some of its best parts. The problem is that the beta almost showed half of Destiny's content, and people didn't realize this.
A very important thing to realize is that Destiny is the best selling start of a franchise on launch. Most other games have to have a startup title to build popularity, but Destiny was able to make a profit on day one sales alone. That means it was successful before anyone even played the game. The Destiny beta was even used as an incentive for people to put down a
preorder for Destiny, as a code for the beta was given to everyone who
preordered the game.
The problem here is that a lot of people acted with speculation. Before anyone truly had a chance to sit down with the full game it made millions. That's where we are in the gaming industry. It isn't anything new and it probably won't go away, but that's where we are.
I'll admit that I fell for it hook line and sinker here, and so did millions of others. I feel like my expectations weren't even that high for Destiny and even I was disappointed.
So where do we go now? Its hard to say. I wrote about my thoughts on gaming journalism a little while ago here when GamerGate was in full swing and they aren't really any different now. There is corruption in gaming journalism and there are agendas that are set. Like normal journalism your best bet is to read the same story written by many different sources and find out what the common truth is.
I just hope Bungie can learn from this for the next Destiny, otherwise I don't think there's ever going to be hope of removing the hype train from the brick wall it has smashed into.
Note: This post isn't pretty yet. I'll make it look nicer later, I just really felt like sharing my view on this Destiny situation and some things it has made me think about.
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